Why books don’t work

A look at how books are not op­ti­mal for con­vey­ing in­for­ma­tion. Analo­gies to lec­tures, with an in­ter­est­ing take on cog­ni­tive mod­els, i.e. the as­sump­tions you make about how learn­ing hap­pens. Also some in­ter­est­ing cita­tions on av­er­age read­ing time and at­ten­tion span.

I re­ally like this piece be­cause it ties to­gether lots of thoughts I’ve pre­vi­ously tried to ex­press, but didn’t find the right words for. I think it does a very good job of point­ing out how the de­fault mediums are not op­ti­mal.

This post makes some rather sweep­ing claims, but is light on data and en­gage­ment with re­search. (In fact, it’s not clear to me af­ter read­ing it whether there is any re­search on the effec­tive­ness of books; surely there must be, but none seems to be men­tioned.)

… ah, no, let me amend that com­ment. Ac­tu­ally, there is a foot­note (it’s easy to miss on a first read) that says:

Un­for­tu­nately, my liter­a­ture re­views have turned up no for­mal stud­ies of this ques­tion, so I can only ap­peal to your in­tu­ition.

Come now! In­tu­ition is a grossly in­suffi­cient and tremen­dously mis­lead­ing guide to an­swer­ing ques­tions like this. If the ques­tion hasn’t been for­mally stud­ied, then the fact is that we sim­ply do not know the an­swer! “We haven’t tried to in­ves­ti­gate the mat­ter sys­tem­at­i­cally, so let’s go with our gut” is no good.

Fur­ther­more, some of the claims about books, and their effect, seem to amount to “gen­er­al­iz­ing from one ex­am­ple” (or, at most, a few ex­am­ples). This is prob­le­matic, es­pe­cially be­cause, in this case, said claims do not seem to me to be true. For in­stance—

Have you ever had a book like this—one you’d read—come up in con­ver­sa­tion, only to dis­cover that you’d ab­sorbed what amounts to a few sen­tences? I’ll be hon­est: it hap­pens to me reg­u­larly.

This does not hap­pen to me reg­u­larly.

I know I’m not alone here. When I share this ob­ser­va­tion with oth­ers—even oth­ers, like my­self, who take learn­ing se­ri­ously—it seems that ev­ery­one has had a similar ex­pe­rience. The con­ver­sa­tion of­ten feels con­fes­sional: there’s some bash­ful­ness, al­most as if these lapses re­veal some un­usual char­ac­ter flaw. I don’t think it’s a char­ac­ter flaw, but what­ever it is, it’s cer­tainly not un­usual. In fact, I sus­pect this is the de­fault ex­pe­rience for most read­ers.

This is not con­sis­tent with my ex­pe­rience.

Some peo­ple may have read Think­ing, Fast and Slow for en­ter­tain­ment value, but in ex­change for their tens of mil­lions of col­lec­tive hours, I sus­pect many read­ers—or maybe even most read­ers—ex­pected to walk away with more.

In these brief notes, we’ll ex­plore why books so of­ten don’t work, and why they suc­ceed when they do.

If you don’t have any solid ev­i­dence at all (much less enough ev­i­dence to war­rant such a strong con­clu­sion) for the claim that “books don’t work”, it seems ex­tremely pre­ma­ture to spec­u­late on why they don’t work, or when they do work. Be­ware of at­tempt­ing to ex­plain phe­nom­ena that are not ac­tu­ally real.

I think I agree that the gen­er­al­iza­tions you cited were hasty, es­pe­cially as there is no for­mal re­view on those mat­ters. I, too, find that I can get value out of books and can prob­a­bly do a bet­ter job than just giv­ing a brief sum­mary.

Let me try to pick out the parts that I liked and see if you dis­agree with those:

The main part of the the­sis that I found in­ter­est­ing was the anal­ogy be­tween books and lec­tures. In both cases, there is the po­ten­tial of trans­mis­sion­ism as one naive way of think­ing about how in­for­ma­tion gets ab­sorbed.

It’s clearer, how­ever, that lec­tures in an ed­u­ca­tional set­ting aren’t enough. Without prob­lem sets, ex­am­ples, and other ap­pli­ca­tions, most of the “real learn­ing” doesn’t hap­pen. (i.e. “math­e­mat­ics is not a spec­ta­tor sport”) Good pro­fes­sors seem to rec­og­nize this and sup­ple­ment their teach­ings ac­cord­ingly.

Then, the au­thor points out that a similar ac­knowl­edg­ment for books is not the norm. There is still room for im­prov­ing the medium, and one ex­am­ple he gave was the spaced rep­e­ti­tion en­hanced on­line book. There is an un­der­cur­rent of “you as the reader need to put in effort to get value out of your read­ing”, which I agree with. It’s a differ­ent state of mind when I’m read­ing for in­sight vs read­ing for fun. In the first case, I might re-read pas­sages, skip around, stop for a bit, take some notes, etc. etc. whereas in the sec­ond case, I’m prob­a­bly just read­ing rather quickly from cover to cover.

Yes, if an in­struc­tor were, for some strange rea­son, to de­cide that he will only give lec­tures, and not as­sign any prob­lems, pro­jects, etc., then the stu­dents will not learn the ma­te­rial. Similarly, if a stu­dent were, for some strange rea­son, to de­cide that he will only at­tend lec­tures and not take notes, put to­gether out­lines or study guides, read the text, or do the ex­er­cises, he will not learn the ma­te­rial.

This seems very ob­vi­ous and is al­most cer­tainly true for the over­whelming ma­jor­ity of, if not all, aca­demic sub­jects. It’s also not new. In fact, I have never met any­one who works in ed­u­ca­tion and thinks oth­er­wise.

Then, the au­thor points out that a similar ac­knowl­edg­ment for books is not the norm.

That any­thing similar is true for books needs to be demon­strated, not just as­serted with­out ev­i­dence. “Books”, for one thing, is a much broader cat­e­gory than “lec­tures”, even if you limit the scope of your claim to non-fic­tion books.

There is still room for im­prov­ing the medium

What medium? Books in gen­eral? Text­books in par­tic­u­lar? If the former, then I’m not re­ally sure how to in­tepret it—what does it mean to im­prove “books”? If the lat­ter, well… text­books already come with sup­ple­men­tary ma­te­rial, such as me­dia on CD or on the web, work­books, ex­er­cises, etc. (I don’t re­mem­ber the last time I en­coun­tered a text­book that you’re ex­pected to just read as if it were a novel, and some­how learn the ma­te­rial that way.) Is there room for some new sort of en­hance­ment to text­books? Yeah, maybe. Who knows.

It seems like maybe what’s go­ing on here is that the au­thor of the linked post has come up with (what he con­sid­ers to be) a fancy new kind of edutech, and in or­der to hype it up, he’s got this grandiose, sweep­ing the­sis about how “books don’t work”, and his fancy new thing is the an­swer. Well, shiny mod­ern edutech ideas are a dime a dozen. They’re mostly empty promises based on ques­tion­able the­o­ries. What makes this one differ­ent?

Yes, if an in­struc­tor were, for some strange rea­son, to de­cide that he will only give lec­tures, and not as­sign any prob­lems, pro­jects, etc., then the stu­dents will not learn the ma­te­rial. Similarly, if a stu­dent were, for some strange rea­son, to de­cide that he will only at­tend lec­tures and not take notes, put to­gether out­lines or study guides, read the text, or do the ex­er­cises, he will not learn the ma­te­rial.

I don’t dis­agree, but this seems in­dica­tive of pre­ex­ist­ing dam­age to the stu­dents or at least a di­rely im­pov­er­ished en­vi­ron­ment. After all, we usu­ally don’t give ba­bies prob­lems, pro­jects, etc to teach them to walk and talk, but they learn just fine. Some­one in­vented this stuff, and plenty of peo­ple in the past have made effi­cient use of stan­dard­ized streams of text (whether de­liv­ered vi­su­ally or au­rally) to im­prove their un­der­stand­ing of a thing.

If some­one said CDs don’t work be­cause you can’t hear the mu­sic by look­ing at them, we’d won­der whether this per­son knows about CD play­ers.

Uh… what? This com­ment re­ally makes very lit­tle sense. I hes­i­tate to try and pick it apart, but liter­ally ev­ery sen­tence of what you wrote there seems to in­di­vi­d­u­ally be wrong, and also to­gether they seem like a bunch of non se­quiturs… I’ve got to be mi­s­un­der­stand­ing what you’re say­ing; could you try and rephrase?

I would ex­pect healthy peo­ple who want to learn some­thing found in a book to think of com­ple­ments to the book, e.g. to take ini­ti­a­tive to try some­thing based on what the book says, to think through differ­ent cases than the ones dis­cussed in the book to see how the same prin­ci­ples might ap­ply, etc.

If stu­dents wouldn’t do that, some­thing’s gone wrong that isn’t eas­ily sum­ma­riz­able as a lo­cal failing of ped­a­gogy.

You’ve switched from talk­ing about lec­tures (in your ear­lier com­ment which con­fused me) to talk­ing about books. Now I’m even more con­fused.

I’m go­ing to go ahead and try and pick apart your ear­lier com­ment, af­ter all, in the hopes that it will let us dis­en­tan­gle this con­fu­sion. Here goes…

Yes, if an in­struc­tor were, for some strange rea­son, to de­cide that he will only give lec­tures, and not as­sign any prob­lems, pro­jects, etc., then the stu­dents will not learn the ma­te­rial. Similarly, if a stu­dent were, for some strange rea­son, to de­cide that he will only at­tend lec­tures and not take notes, put to­gether out­lines or study guides, read the text, or do the ex­er­cises, he will not learn the ma­te­rial.

I don’t dis­agree, but this seems in­dica­tive of pre­ex­ist­ing dam­age to the stu­dents or at least a di­rely im­pov­er­ished en­vi­ron­ment.

This seems straight­for­wardly false, but there’s not much to dis­sect here with­out speci­fics of why you think this. One ques­tion does oc­cur to me: by “this” do you re­fer to the first part of the bit you quoted (about the in­struc­tor), or the sec­ond (about the stu­dent), or both?

After all, we usu­ally don’t give ba­bies prob­lems, pro­jects, etc to teach them to walk and talk, but they learn just fine.

But of course we do. Par­ents talk to their kids, and read to them, in­clud­ing chil­dren’s books and alpha­bet books and nursery rhymes and “say ‘ma-ma’! go on… ‘ma-ma’!” and so on; and par­ents play with their kids, and build or buy playpens, etc., etc. What is that, but “prob­lems” and “pro­jects”?

Some­one in­vented this stuff, and plenty of peo­ple in the past have made effi­cient use of stan­dard­ized streams of text (whether de­liv­ered vi­su­ally or au­rally) to im­prove their un­der­stand­ing of a thing.

This is a per­plex­ing sen­tence and I’m not sure how to in­ter­pret it; do you sim­ply mean “peo­ple have been giv­ing lec­tures and writ­ing books for a long time”? If so, then of course that is true, but do you claim that “in the past” (when?), lec­tures didn’t come with ex­er­cises or prob­lems or any form of prac­tice, but nonethe­less were as effec­tive, or more effec­tive, than mod­ern in­struc­tion?

(And I re­ally have no clue what “Some­one in­vented this stuff” refers to.)

If some­one said CDs don’t work be­cause you can’t hear the mu­sic by look­ing at them, we’d won­der whether this per­son knows about CD play­ers.

I’m hav­ing a hard time ap­ply­ing this anal­ogy/​metaphor to the case of lec­tures. In this metaphor, it seems to me, I said “if you’re handed only a CD and no player, you will not be able to hear the mu­sic on it”, and you’re say­ing “the in­abil­ity to hear the mu­sic on a CD with­out hav­ing a player is a sign of pre-ex­ist­ing dam­age”. Or, some­thing like that?

Any­way, if you find your­self mo­ti­vated to ex­plain fur­ther, please stick with the topic of lec­tures; it seems to me that I need to un­der­stand what you’re say­ing about that, be­fore you can talk about whether the same ap­plies to books, etc.

Lec­tures were liter­ally in­vented as a method of text dis­tri­bu­tion, when print­ing was un­available and pa­per ex­pen­sive. I don’t mean that in the past they were more effec­tive than in­te­grated in­struc­tion—I mean that an aca­demic con­text in which the main for­mal ser­vice pro­vided was de­liv­ery of lec­tures did not pre­vent stu­dents from think­ing about the con­tent of lec­tures on their own.

Here’s what I meant by the CD metaphor. It seems like there’s an old prac­tice of do­ing the equiv­a­lent of hand­ing stu­dents CDs. We can now see that this prac­tice is bro­ken, in the sense that stu­dents, lack­ing CD play­ers, don’t ap­pre­ci­ate the mu­sic or other au­dio. One plau­si­ble in­ter­pre­ta­tion is that the prac­tice of hand­ing stu­dents CDs has always been a poor fit for the au­dio for­mats com­pat­i­ble with stu­dents’ ears. But an­other plau­si­ble in­ter­pre­ta­tion—the one I’m propos­ing—is that the stu­dents used to have CD play­ers, and no longer do.

Like­wise, it’s not as though learn­ing didn’t go on in highly lec­ture-cen­tric (or book-cen­tric) con­texts. So if stu­dents aren’t learn­ing from lec­tures (and books), we might ex­pect that some in­ter­pre­tive fac­ulty they used to have is now ab­sent. This seems to me like it ought to be a higher pri­or­ity to get to stu­dents (or stop tak­ing away from them), than the con­tent of al­most any par­tic­u­lar lec­ture course.

Par­ents talk to their kids, and read to them, in­clud­ing chil­dren’s books and alpha­bet books and nursery rhymes and “say ‘ma-ma’! go on… ‘ma-ma’!” and so on; and par­ents play with their kids, and build or buy playpens, etc., etc. What is that, but “prob­lems” and “pro­jects”?

It’s play. In ex­tremely rare cases like A Math­e­mat­i­cian’s La­ment, peo­ple do pro­pose that teach­ers play with their stu­dents about the sub­ject mat­ter, but mostly prob­lem sets and pro­jects are not as­signed by the same meth­ods by which lan­guage is in­tro­duced to chil­dren. If the OP were propos­ing that pro­fes­sors play with their stu­dents, I’d be more sym­pa­thetic, and have brought up the ba­bies as a con­firm­ing rather than dis­con­firm­ing ex­am­ple!

The au­thor seems to spend al­most no time en­gag­ing with or think­ing crit­i­cally about the books that he’s read, and then claims that “books don’t work”. Has the au­thor tried writ­ing an out­line? Or writ­ing a re­view?

Sim­ply read­ing a book, and let­ting its con­tents wash over you won’t mag­i­cally make you re­tain the con­tents of that book. There is no royal road to knowl­edge. One has to en­gage with a book in or­der to re­tain not just the con­clu­sions of the book, but also the rea­son­ing that led to the con­clu­sions.

I don’t think the au­thor dis­agrees all that much with you. I’m read­ing his claim as some­thing more like “the de­fault at­ti­tude (some) peo­ple have to­wards read­ing does not set them up for good learn­ing”.

In the es­say, he ac­knowl­edges the role that effort and metacog­ni­tion play in mak­ing the ac­tual learn­ing hap­pen. The ac­tion­able parts I found use­ful were at the end where he was hy­poth­e­siz­ing about im­proved mediums, e.g. an on­line text­book with spaced rep­e­ti­tion built in to fa­cil­i­tate re­call.

There is no royal road to knowl­edge. One has to en­gage with a book in or­der to re­tain not just the con­clu­sions of the book, but also the rea­son­ing that led to the con­clu­sions.

But what if there was? Cer­tainly with hard work and deep read­ing, you can learn a good amount from books. How­ever, the cen­tral point of the piece is that this is not the op­ti­mal way to learn. What if with other mediums you can have a lot of this work done for you, learn­ing more ma­te­rial in less time?

More se­ri­ously, I would love for there to be a bet­ter way to learn than books, but in prac­tice, books in­habit a sweet spot at the in­ter­sec­tion of in­for­ma­tion den­sity, ease of search­ing, and porta­bil­ity that’s hard for other forms of me­dia to match.

I think that “books don’t work” isn’t a pre­cise enough state­ment.Take Think­ing Fast and Slow, per­son­ally I found the book difficult to read be­cause while the con­tent is in­ter­est­ing the writ­ing it­self isn’t com­pat­i­ble[1] . Maybe be­cause of the genre or in­tended au­di­ence but the book in it­self isn’t a good choice to learn about it’s con­tent (Judg­ment un­der un­cer­tainty, bi­ases …)

I see it this way, to learn about a spe­cific sub­ject I se­lect and skim sev­eral text­books choose the smaller one in num­ber of pages (more on this later) and work trough it on the span of weeks (note tak­ing, try­ing to un­der­stand ev­ery part and re­flect on where it comes from and so on...)
Books like Think­ing Fast and Slow I read on a ca­sual ba­sis (com­mute/​coffee/​meals) my goal isn’t nec­es­sar­ily to un­der­stand ev­ery­thing but more like high-light­ing pas­sages of in­ter­ests, im­por­tant state­ments etc...

Michael Niel­sen text for ex­am­ple about Neu­ral Net­works I worked trough it in text­book fash­ion it has in­ter­ac­tive mediums to give an in­tu­itive feel but still it re­quired a bit of think­ing and re­flex­ion.

I don’t think the medium is the is­sue here.

[1] I’d de­scribe it as heavy on the prose or writ­ing I don’t have the ex­act words :(

You might like to read “peak” by an­ders Eric­s­son on learn­ing and ex­per­tise.

Per­son­ally I read a lot of books. I then grow, change, adapt and think differ­ently be­cause of the ~70 I’ve read each year for the past 3 years (and less each year be­fore that). I of­ten en­counter peo­ple say­ing that they don’t learn from books. And ask­ing me if I do learn from them. I can quote a lot of the books, I can de­scribe how they fit in with the other books I know, I can teach peo­ple what was in the books.

I don’t be­lieve I am an anomaly. I agree that in-per­son in­for­ma­tion trans­mis­sion is more effec­tive, but the trans­mit­ter needs to be good enough. And available. Many books I’ve read, I could not book the au­thors time to chat and teach me what they know.

Words point to the non-con­cep­tual re­al­ity. In-per­son trans­mis­sion en­ables em­bod­i­ment of lan­guage as well. In short—po­ten­tially more trans­mits.

With books, the writ­ing has to be care­ful to trans­mit well. Or the reader has to make as­sump­tions. I tend to think, “who would I have to be to be­lieve what the au­thor has said.” at the same time as con­sid­er­ing the truth claims and rele­vance to my­self and my per­cep­tion of re­al­ity.

Still read­ing, but I cer­tainly got off the bus a bit with this para­graph (which seems largely false to me).

Let’s be­gin by look­ing at text­books in prac­tice. It’s strik­ing that aca­demic courses are of­ten struc­tured around text­books, but lots of peo­ple spend the ex­tra time and money to en­roll in those courses—rather than just study­ing the text­books in­de­pen­dently. In­deed, I sus­pect that text­books are mostly pur­chased for course syl­labi, not for self-study. Sure: some peo­ple take courses be­cause they want a cre­den­tial. But plenty of stu­dents gen­uinely feel they’ll learn more by tak­ing courses than they would by study­ing those courses’ text­books. As­sum­ing stu­dents’ feel­ings aren’t com­pletely mis­placed, courses must be offer­ing some­thing ex­tra that’s im­por­tant to how peo­ple learn.

Courses seem to provide peo­ple a way to mo­ti­vate them­selves to study that most peo­ple wouldn’t have in the same way for read­ing a text­book (even when in the LW space there are more peo­ple who like read­ing text­books).

A good book non-fic­tion book not only helps peo­ple to learn a new sub­ject but it also pro­vides ev­i­dence that what’s sup­posed to be learned is true.

I have the im­pres­sion that the au­thor of the ar­ti­cle doesn’t see that as an im­por­tant part of the job of a book and would be very will­ing to re­place the book with edtech that only fo­cuses on trans­mit­ting ideas so that they are in the head of the stu­dent with­out go­ing through the trou­ble of pro­vid­ing a case for them.